Passengers: For Here There Are No Stars
by Hawki
Summary: Oneshot: Aurora Lane had been born on Earth. And now, it was a certainty that she would die in space.
**For Here There Are No Stars**

 _I'm going to die on this ship._

The thought had crossed her mind as early as Earth. The idea that she'd enter stasis and never wake up. That she'd drown, or asphyxiate, or the ship would fly into a supernova, or anything else from the annals of science fiction. It had entered her mind in the same way that the thought of crashing came up whenever she'd boarded a plane back on Earth. Never mind that planes had been around for centuries and were the safest form of travel out there, she couldn't shake the apprehension that something was going to happen to her. That she was on a moving vehicle with no control over the outcome.

And now, instead of a plane traveling over the speed of sound, she, Aurora Dunn, good ol' girl out of Queens and aspiring writer, was on a starship moving at 20% of the speed of light, dispatched from Earth 31 years ago on a colonization mission to Homestead Colony. Thanks to an accident one year ago, she and one other passenger on this flying coffin had been let out of stasis early, with no way to reactivate their pods. After a year of bickering, tinkering, and cutting into the ship's stores, it had become clear that while Jim Preston was a skilled mechanic, the intricacies of cryogenic hibernation was beyond him. That they'd been released from the womb early, and mummy wasn't letting them back in.

 _I'm going to die._

So she sat here on the bridge, looking out into the darkness of space as she mulled the thought, now a certainty, over. It only part of the ship that had any windows – the passengers and crew would be in stasis for the majority of the trip, they weren't going to want to see the view. And, as she looked out into the entropy that was the inter-system gulf between the stars of the Orion Arm, she thought that maybe a supernova wasn't such a bad idea right now. At least it would give her something to look at.

"Hey."

She didn't even glance at Jim as he walked onto the bridge, holding a bottle of water in one hand, and a MRE in the other. The food on the ship was designed to be held for over a century, not satiate the taste buds. And the company…She kept staring out into the dark. Living with only one person for a year, and faced with that prospect for the rest of her life…what else was there to say.

"View's good."

She kept staring, even as he made his way to the bridge's microwave. She didn't know why a bridge had a microwave, but there wasn't any mess hall on this damn boat. She could deal with the non-existent smell of space food being cooked. At least, unlike a few centuries ago, there was actual gravity.

"Tell me," Aurora murmured. "Do you think that when we die, and the colonists find our cold dead bodies, they'll care that we ate into their supplies?"

Jim glanced at her. "We're not going to die."

She snorted. "Right. Sure. We're going to live for the next eighty-plus years as our air runs out."

"The ship's life support systems will keep us alive."

"Right, of course." She sighed. "Course we're using up heat, among other things. Do you think our corpses will smell? I hear cryo is a good way to preserve the dead."

The microwave door slammed shut. She watched Jim as he sat on an adjacent seat, water in one hand, baked beans in a tray in the other.

"What do you want from me?" he asked.

"A solution might be nice."

"I'm working on it."

"For a year. I think we're a bit beyond 'working on it.'"

Jim didn't say anything. He just sat there, eating. And Aurora pondered over the questions in her mind. The questions that neither of them wanted to face. Right now, death was a certainty. How or when they died was another issue. Because the ship was designed to be in low power mode throughout its trip, meant to provide over 5000 people with heat, air, and sustenance in the beginning and ending of their trip. Not keep two humans alive for decades on end. Aurora could guess that the food and water might be able to sustain them. But the heat and air, not so much. And even then, they had to face the possibility that they might have to shut the systems down themselves. They'd activated automatically when their pods had opened. Now they were cutting into the energy that would be needed for the 5,257 other passengers. How many of them would have to die so they could live a little longer?

So she kept staring as Jim ate in silence. Even after he asked her whether she wanted anything, she shook her head and kept her gaze fixed on the starless sky. She wasn't hungry. And right now, she wasn't in the mood to feed a body that would never walk on a planet again.

"So…" Jim ventured eventually. "You up for a game tonight?"

"Tonight," Aurora murmured. "Huh."

"Huh?"

"Oh, you know, 'tonight,'" she mocked. "I mean, we're in space, aren't we? Do you think night and day mean anything."

"I'm just going by the ship's clock."

"Sure." She let out a laugh. "Don't you think it should count backwards I mean, should we agree beforehand when we pop off and-"

Jim got up and began to walk away.

"There's no stars," she called out. "No stars, no suns, no aliens, or comets, or anything." She got up as well and gestured to one of the windows. "There's nothing. Nothing!"

Jim stood at the exit to the bridge, his shoulders sagged, his arms low. Slowly, he looked at her. His eyes met hers. The eyes of a man who knew he was doomed to die. A man who would die in company or alone, and would go unmourned and unremembered by the people of two worlds.

"My name's Aurora," she murmured. She sighed, and took a seat. "I thought, I'd go into space. Write a book on space travel. See the aurora of an alien world." She looked up at Jim. "Now I can't even see the stars."

Jim didn't say anything. He turned around and walked out. And Aurora couldn't blame him. They were in the same position. They were doomed either way. And after a year, they had said everything that needed to be said.

So once more she turned to the windows of the bridge, as the universe, in its emptiness, rushed by her. The universe, in its entropy, in its darkness, in its callousness, looked upon her.

And laughed.


End file.
